The Prophecy' continues the Seventh Son story, where the boy Alvin pleads with the village to heed his warnings of coming disaster, but is not heeded. This is another excellent song, whose mood fits exactly with the lyrics. It ends uncharacteristically with a short but really beautiful acoustic guitar section.
What catastrophe befell the village is not indicated and to dwell on the destruction of a single village seems a bit preposterous to us nowadays, as we usually fret more for entire countries than for isolated little groups. Let's remember that this is supposed to be a medieval tale and that, at the time, people cared more for villages than for whole countries or kingdoms (the impact of images is only a recent thing that has been promoted first by the television, then by the Internet).
The story also seems to indicate once again that the future is already written and cannot be changed. Indeed, if the Seventh Son had seen the "future" and the events had not occurred thanks to his warning, then was what he saw really the future, or simply a "possible future"? This reminds me of Robert Silverberg's 1967 novel, The Gate of Worlds, set in a world where the Black Plague had devastated Europe more than it actually did in the Middle-Ages, leading to a Saracen invasion and a radical change in the History of the World. This novel hints that there are several possible futures that are created at each and every instant, and that, given the circumstances, anything can happen depending on present events (imagine, for instance, what the world would be like nowadays if Hitler had died at Passchendaele in 1916...). On the contrary, what the Seventh Son saw in the present story is a future that was going to happen regardless of his efforts to change it. A tale of Fate in a nutshell.
The future the Seventh Son saw could not be changed and whatever sinister fate struck the village was inevitable. The surviving villagers then blame the messenger for the message (quite sadly a common occurrence) and the "hero" of the story is subsequently singled out and ostracised.
